By Sanji Bhal, Director, Marketing Communications

Back in April, 2016 we published a guest blog post authored by Professor Marcel Jaspars, head of the Marine Biodiscovery Centre at the University of Aberdeen, and leader of the PharmaSea project. I encourage you to check it out because Prof. Jaspars and his team did some fascinating work related to the advancement of novel antibiotics—a field that is under scrutiny due to the increasing number of drug-resistant microbes, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has recognized as global health crisis.

Taking a step back, if you don’t know what the PharmaSea project is, it is a consortium of 24 partners from 13 countries, and its primary goal is to collect and screen samples from some of the hottest, deepest, and coldest places on the planet. But why go through all this effort? The EU-funded project, which recently concluded, had the sole purpose of tackling the growing problem of drug-resistant microbes by going to such extreme locations to discover new antibiotics and improve global health.

If you’d like to learn more, Prof. Jaspers was featured in PharmaSea’s latest video discussing his work on the project as well as his team’s research methodologies. He goes on to explain that while PharmaSea’s primary goal was the discovery and identification of new microbes, his team also made a number of unexpected discoveries related to the treatment of Epilepsy and Alzheimer’s.

Check out the full 11-minute video below to learn more about the PharmaSea program and the steps these scientists took to conquer the world of antibiotic-resistance bacteria:

Even though the PharmaSea project has concluded, it will still be a long time before the discoveries made by Prof. Jaspars and his team influence the drugs that make it into our local pharmacies. However, Prof. Jaspars firmly believes the research the PharmaSea program uncovered will provide a number of benefits across the scientific community. Also, keep an eye out for the PharmaSea program’s full report, which should be published on the organization's website soon!

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